Again, folks, thank you very much. I was just going to start by going through the graphs, but since
Hag was as kind as to post them already, let me go into AAR. It's been a fun game, but, in dom terms, the battle lasted long enough for me to start accruing way too much fatigue at the end of it. I am slightly miffed by the horrors fucking me over at the end for a few turns, especially since the victory was so close that I could lick it, but
Hag was a good sport, pulled a few nice tricks and, as it turns out, had a solid lead on me with regards to prov count, so there's no bitterness in my heart - again, well deserved.
Piconyeah
Piconye is one of the newer nations, and one I've been hoping to play for a while. Not because of their recruit-anywhere fliers, not because of their mages who are born to serve as massable evo batteries, not because of their sacred crossbowmen - but because it's finally a halfling-sized nation we've been all waiting for so long. These might not exactly be the chad hoburgs, but rather their horny cousins twice removed, but it was still good enough to RP as a pipe weed addition enthusiast.
Alternate name for my pretender was going to be HIGH ASF, because he, uh, had high air, astral and fire.
I think it's a fairly powerful nation, or at least one whose strengths are really easy to leverage. Their infantry is shit, but the defenders are good enough for standing in place and holding the line, and by having at least one small group of eagle riders set to hold and attack rear you'll usually have at least some of your enemies running back and forth, being peppered with bolts and evos. You can easily communion up astral, fire, earth and holy (with a small sprinkling of other paths), have massable casters who also do double duty as solid researcheres and rec-anywhere eagle riders can serve as eagle raiders. The holy crossbows proved extremely helpful, and turned the tide of battle more than once, not sure how the melee sacreds would work out.
Two main pain-points are that anyone casting storm (not to mention perpetual storm, which additionally fucks over their eagle riders) defangs Piconye from their main tricks, and that their army sucks when it comes to sieges. Combination of small size and gluttony means that you might simply not be able to mass enough siege power to mount a proper siege, or defend for longer than a turn or two.
I think the pretender I used is going to be fairly standard fare for Piconye - strong non-awake bless for shooters (and commanders), some scales, and paths that, when equipped with rings, let you cast a number of globals and summon their national angels.
I regret not having taken a screenshot at creation, but I picked a Burning Glyph with something like S7F5A4, O1P2H1G2L1M1 (not very confident about the scales). Here he is, having been empowered in Nature to summon Arels.
I do hovewer hope someone will at some point try the meme frost cloud crossbowmen build I posted in the dom thread.
Early game: Dogs and lizards, get out of my pantry!
Initial expansion went fairly painlessly. It feels like the glory days of having flying spec-ops assasinate enemy commanders are well behind us, but the crossbowmen were able to one-shot most indies and hit pretty well. Any incoming opposition usually rushed back the moment the eagles struck their backline, which served to give my shooters a few more turns. Compared to my last two games things went really well.
A major event which was to be surprisingly beneficial to me in the long run, was when I clashed with Andramatia's expansion party. A group of my eagles killed
Dayyālu 's hero commander, which led to a few friendly discussions. I think that this added to him failing the IRL morale check, which was to be a huge help in the mid-game.
Anyways, having allied all my neighbours other than C'Tis, I exchanged a few messages with
Popot and agreed that lizard swamps need to be properly aired.
Tanaka gave a brave fight, which included a really close battle where my holy crossbowmen ran out of ammo and charged with their solar weapon daggers, but he eventually got pushed into his home fortress by combined forces of BIG and smol, and got sieged by Phlegra. He continued to perform a valiant defense, with occasional siege breaks and raids, which was ideal for me, as (sorry,
Popot !) it meant that Phlegra was in no position to continue their expansion westwards. This gave me a lot of breathing room.
Mid-game: Restoring the Magnificent Ind!
Shortly before that, both the succubi and dogs failed their IRL morale checks. This meant, that I had an AI, well-forted neighbour to the west, and no opponents willing to invade me. This began a long-running campaign of reinstating at least part of the Magnificent Ind. AI dogs had no real chance of mounting any real defence, but the challange of Piconye's shitty sieging power meant that I wasted some of my time; things only really picked up once I crafted a complement of gate cleavers. I boomed, summoned elemental aristocracy, cast a number of globals - things were going really well.
I think this is when my lack of late game experience started to show, though. I aimed for the big, fuckoff angels, rather than for setting up a wish engine, and massing golems. At that point it was either reinstating the Magnificent Ind fully (by beating up on feminists), or going up after vampires, as they seemed on-par with me, power-level wise. I was still confident enough that, seeing how the Cataclysm was approaching, I asked Ulm if he'd be willing to resolve this like real men - which he was.
Late game: I AM A GENIUS - OH NO
Which led into the amazing Dom style of warfare that only this game lends itself to. Our borders quickly became fractals, as we both got into a rhytm of raiding and counter-raiding, while mashing our big stacks against each other. I sniped some commanders with mind hunts,
Hag responded with surprise horror buttsekcs. He threw some demonic locust my way, I put up first Purgatory and then Wrath of God to discourage raids into my dominion. The Chayots very much failed to live up to their cost, but my eco led to me winning most large-scale army fights. This was unfortunately when things really picked up at my work, and the fatigue accrual started getting to me. I sent some of the global-maintaining ele aristocracy into the grinder where it wasn't exactly necessary, and GfHeavened quite a few of my own troops (although there is a theory of GfH primarily being a self-deletion tool...).
Cataclysm soon rolled in and things became a gamble. I had two turns where I was confident that I was going to win in the next one, only to be properly nommed by Scabiel & co. I reorganized my army to push towards another throne in Ulm territory after effectively giving up on defending non-throne provinces.
I had access to teledropping Chayots, and there were two unclaimed thrones somewhere but as I screwed up on setting up a scout network, I had no idea where they actually were.
Hag leveraged ghostly mercenaries and then his undead pretender to snipe an underwater throne which I wasn't able to fort from me, and just when I was about to take it back I got some additional horrors on my thrones, which led to his well-deserved victory.
What a game. Cheers!
